For reasons perhaps related to the ideas dished out in a previous post, Stephen Frears decided to set his version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, MARY REILLY (based on a pretty good book by Valerie Martin) in a version of Edinburgh… I say a version, because in this Edinburgh everyone has an English accent (Glaswegians might argue this is quite accurate) and the city is populated by distinguished English character actors such as George Cole and Michael Gambon.

Nevertheless, the fogbound metropolis is surmounted by a recreation of the Greek Parthenon (tricked up in the studio) and Frears and his unit decamped to the actual Edinburgh for a week of location shooting. Basically none of this material made it into the movie, which is mostly studio-bound and none the worse for it.

But due to the Edinburgh connection, and the fact that Scot producer Iain Smith oversaw the production, I gleaned a little on-set gossip.

Brown was called to Julia Roberts dressing room one day. It seemed her then-husband Lyle Lovett (remember THAT beautiful affair?) was going to be in New York that weekend. “Isn’t that great?” beamed la Roberts. “So he’s going to be in New York, and I could fly out and meet him, and we could spend the weekend together! In New York!”

Brown replied that this was indeed great, although he couldn’t quite see what it had to do with him. He left. By the time he got back to his office, his phone was already ringing. It was a sweary agent. “You are ****ing going to ****ing buy Julia Roberts a first-class ****ing plane ticket to New York, you ****ing ****!” he swore. “Fuck!” Sorry, he sneaked that one in past the asterisks while I was talking to you.

Brown refused, the agent swore at some more producers, and eventually the studio caved and met her demands, which she never had to actually even personally voice…

Anyhow, the shoot goes on. John Malkovich is playing Jekyll and Hyde (with resulting confusion as to which is which) and he’s not getting on too well with the Roberts. Malkovich has been known to be difficult himself, in fact — hold everything — here’s a story about him —

This one’s from DANGEROUS LIAISONS and it’s literally too good to be true — ie it’s probably made up. But not by me. Malkovich is doing DANGEROUS LIAISONS for Frears, and Frears visits his dressing room.

“John, I want to talk to you about your character.”

“Well, sure. Valmont is a very complicated guy –”

“No, John, you don’t understand. I want to talk to you about YOUR character.”

Flashforward back to whatever I was talking about. Oh yeah. MARY REILLY wraps, and Malkovich approaches Julia R. “I just wanted to say…” and here he tells her, essentially, that she’s an arrogant, stuck-up bitch, no professional, and he’s by no means enjoyed working with her and looks forward to never having to meet her again.

Three months later they’re back, re-shooting the climactic scene where she weeps over him as he dies in her arms…

The film itself? Some good work, the feeling of unease at the start is effective, suggesting that Frears could make a genuinely scary horror movie if it didn’t cost $50 million, but the novel’s conceit — the story told from the point of view of a chambermaid — is somewhat resistant to visualisation, since her POV is so limited: she misses the most dramatic events of the book. It could probably be done, but it would need greater talents. Christopher Hampton did a fine job adapting DANGEROUS LIAISONS but his subsequent films tend to the disastrous. He seems to embody the more deleterious effects of the literary-theatrical tradition on British film. The fact that three endings were shot gives a sense of how lost the filmmakers became.

Worse, Frears usual intelligence seems to have operated only fitfully. There are bizarre mismatches of word and image. When Roberts describes her brute of a father as having an odd walk, “not quite a limp,” it’s a surprise to then see Michael Gambon hobble wildly up like Long John Silver on a pub crawl, walking on one ankle.

One of the local papers here just carried a surprising story that ungovernably prolific genius Raoul Ruiz is planning an adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to be filmed in “modern” Aberdeen, with John Malkovich in the lead.

Ruiz has often expressed his admiration for RLS, and has worked with Malkovich successfully on TIME REGAINED and KLIMT, and recently gave a lecture in Aberdeen which I only heard about when it was too late. I would willingly have travelled to that granite scowl of a city to hear the Great Man’s thoughts. So these various facts make the project more or less explicable.

But it’s still a little odd, since Malkovich has already played Jekyll & Hyde, in Stephen Frears’ unsuccessful MARY REILLY (basically, the Jekyll story told from the perspective of the doctor’s maid), and a little of that was actually shot in Scotland. Although RLS set his morality tale in London, it’s often been suggested that the schizoid nature of Stephenson’s hometown, Edinburgh, with its respectable New Town and dark, crooked Old Town, was a major influence on the tale. Plus I think Stephen Frears fancied getting out of the studio for a bit, so the whole company transferred from Pinewood to Edinburgh at considerable expense to shoot a little around St Stephen’s Church and Greyfriar’s Churchyard, 90% of which wound up on the cutting room floor.

Through eminent Scots producer Iain Smith, some fun stories filtered from the shoot: one day, star Julia Roberts summoned him and announced, with much toothy smiling, that she was thinking of flying to New York to be with her new husband Lyle Lovett (remember THAT love match?) for the weekend. Smith said that sounded very nice, but wondered what it had to do with him. By the time he walked from Roberts’ trailer back to his office the phone was ringing. He picked it up and a man swore at him. It was Roberts’ agent, explaining, through the medium of profanity, how Smith had better find the money in his budget for Roberts’ little jaunt. I don’t think Smith ever actually agreed to do this, but it happened anyway. Studios like to keep their stars happy.

At the end of shooting the last scene, Malkovich approached his co-star and told her, in the frankest terms, how little he had enjoyed working with her and how greatly he looked forward to never finding himself in her presence again so long as he lived. A few months later both were called back to re-shoot the romantic finale… That must’ve been a happy reunion.

In the end, three endings were shot, none apparently very satisfying (the book kind of peters out too). This failure to get to grips with what the story was trying to achieve had a deleterious effect on the whole film. It starts well, creating horror and anxiety out of seemingly innocent domestic details, then fails to find any h. or a. in the actual horror-movie events central to the plot. The normally bright-witted Frears allows startling mismatches of word and image: Roberts describes her cruel father as having “not quite a limp”, and then we get a flashback of Michael Gambon lurching about on one ankle, the most extreme limp anybody’s ever seen. Malkovich’s Jekyll looks and sounds just like his Hyde (different hair and nose, is all), making nonsense of everybody’s confusion, which is all the more damaging in this version, since we’re supposed to share Julia Roberts’ viewpoint. We get the striking Bronagh Gallagher from THE COMMITMENTS as the other maid, which allows us to notice how much better suited than Roberts she would be to playing the lead. The best thing in it is living legend George Cole, late of the 50s ST TRINIANS films, as Poole, the butler.

Returning to the Ruiz: why Aberdeen? Presumably the place impressed Ruiz on his recent visit. It has a heavy slate ceiling of sky so low you can reach up and touch it, which could be a dramatic feature, and the whole city is grey, which at least gives it a unified look, even if the look is one you could achieve by diving into a cement mixer. I don’t have a copy of Christopher Brookmyre’s A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away to hand, but the author devotes most of chapter two to a demolition job on the “Silver City”:

‘”Silver City” my arse. It was grey. It. Was. Grey. If Aberdeen was silver then shite wasn’t brown, it was burnished sienna.’

Or words to that effect. But what the hell. I’m excited by the idea of Ruiz filming anywhere in Scotland, anywhere in the UK, anywhere AT ALL. The idea of him having to deal with the bureaucrats at Scottish Screen, our native funding body, is oddly hilarious, since in KLIMT he created a character called the Secretary, who defines his job at the Ministry of Arts as that of preventing any art from actually happening. Some people have said the same thing about our own Scottish Screen.

In fact, I can hold my hand up and say that when the organisation was called The Scottish Film Production Fund, it was I who started referring to it as The Scottish Film Prevention Fund, a nickname that caught on with alarming speed, until the outfit was reborn as the S.S. No possible jokes there.

Despite their initials, they are good people over there in Glasgow, the only problem being the endemic inertia and caution associated with committees and quangos the world over. Dynamic leadership might yet overcome this barrier. They were kind enough to co-fund three of my shorts, which gave me a career of sorts, after ten years’ aimless hoping. When I asked the then-head, Steve Macintyre, why he had voted against CRY FOR BOBO (he was in the minority and it still got selected) he told me that it struck him as the kind of film that would be very good if it was done well, but awful if it was done badly. Now, allowing for the strong possibility that perhaps this was a polite lie and really he just hated the script, it seems to me that the only films worth doing are the ones that fall into this exact category. The alternative is films that will never be terribly good no matter how hard everybody works, and it is these to which Scotland has devoted much of its slender resources through most of our brief history as a feature-film producing nation.

So, if Ruiz’s formidable imagination and strong reputation can stir Scottish Screen to action, and he can raise the rest of his finances elsewhere, from venture capitalists with short memories who no longer recall MARY REILLY, we could look forward to a truly unusual rendition of the Stephenson classic, one that genuinely merits that part of the original title usually omitted: The Strange Case…